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Originally posted by IowaHawkeye
my life does have purpose and direction! that actually sounds fascinating to me - thank god!!!! wait, does that make me really odd, or just plain dumb? get me out of undergrad, i want to go to law school now! 
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Oh yeah, it's wild and crazy times. The cases are all these weird fact patterns, and you read that stuff all semester, then you have your final at the end and the Professor creates a REALLY weird set of facts for you to analyze, based on what you've learned from analyzing all the previous cases of weird facts.
Case in point: The horror of every Torts class: the infamous Palsgraf case. My study partners and I were wishing that Cardozo and Andrews (the two judges that wrote the majority and dissenting opinions) to ROT IN H***.
Guy getting on a train, but he's late and the train has started to move. One train employee gives him a boost and another employee who's on the train extends a hand to help pull him up. (I know you've seen this in movies when someone is late and runs to jump up on the train)
In the process of helping this idiot with a punctuality problem on the train, he gets bumped around and drops a small package he was holding. He does make it on the train.
However, that package contained fireworks. Why the hell he was bringing a small unmarked package of fireworks on a train, I don't know. So anyway, the box falls, hits the tracks, and BOOM! explodes.
The explosion carries some kind of shock wave to the platform about 30' away and everyone standing there panics. Mrs. Palsgraf, our helpless little plaintiff, was standing under some heavy scales. (you know the old fashioned kind). The scales fall and hit her, causing and injury and this lovely little lawsuit.
So the judges writing the opinions go into these loooooooonnnnngggg detailed analyses of whether it was "reasonably foreseeable" by the train employees that the package was potentially dangerous to people standing on the platform 30 feet away. If anyone has insomnia problems, look up this case, it will cure you! Page after page after page of these complex, yet stultifyingly vague, theoretical concepts. I almost expected them to start discussing "What is the meaning of life?"
In the meantime though, you gotta ask, who cares about whether or not you can "reasonably foresee" such a wack-ass chain of events? Of course you can't! But isn't the problem more that maybe, just MAYBE, train employees shouldn't let people board trains that are MOVING???
Especially if their movement is restricted, i.e. they're carrying a friggin' box?
My Torts class spend an entire hour on this case. The prof was relentless in going through ALLLLLLL the details of the majority and dissenting opinions and asking a bazillion questions about each side, all of which we got wrong. Then he concluded by basically saying that we were all completely hopeless and the true negligence lay in passengers boarding moving trains. So WHY THE HECK did you just spend an HOUR asking us about all that other stuff?